The Solomon Effect: How One American Columnist Became Everyone Else’s Foreign Policy
The Name That Echoes from Kyiv to Caracas
John Solomon, American by passport, has become a sort of global Rorschach test: everyone peers at the same inkblot and sees whatever scandal they need to survive the news cycle. In Washington he is either the last honest gumshoe or a walking conflict-of-interest dressed in a trench coat, depending on which green room is buttering the croissants. But step outside the Beltway and the name travels like contraband perfume—whispered in the corridors of Ankara, weaponised in WhatsApp groups from Lagos to Lima, and translated into parliamentary sound bites in languages that never quite nail the pronunciation of “Solomon.”
From an international vantage point, Solomon’s greatest export isn’t a scoop but the template: how to launder domestic political laundry so thoroughly that it emerges abroad as crisp, plausible “intelligence.” Ukrainian lawmakers—some still licking wounds from Trump’s first impeachment—cite his Ukraine columns the way British MPs quote football scores. Brazilian bloggers splice his segments into Telegram explainers on “deep-state coups,” proving that nothing unites the global fringe faster than a shared Google Translate button. Even the Kremlin’s English-language troll farms keep a folder labelled “JS-Ready,” a one-stop shop for whataboutism whenever someone mentions Navalny.
One has to admire the logistics. A story that begins in a Washington think-tank cubicle can, within 72 hours, mutate into front-page headlines in Manila, complete with a local “expert” who once interned at the same think tank and therefore “confirms” the story. It’s globalization’s dark alchemy: transmute domestic gossip into foreign policy gold, then re-import it as “international concern.” Solomon didn’t invent the carousel, but he greased the bearings so well that other riders forget they’re going in circles.
The implications ripple outward like cheap vodka at a state dinner. In Warsaw, officials nervously ask whether the next U.S. administration will remember NATO’s Article 5 or only the latest Solomon segment about “Ukrainian corruption.” In Jakarta, democracy-watchers track his Twitter feed the way commodities traders watch soybean futures; a single Solomon tweet can shave points off the rupiah if it hints at a bipartisan pivot away from Southeast Asia. Meanwhile, in Brussels, EU diplomats practice their weary shrug: they know the dossiers they receive from Washington often contain footnotes that trace back to a single byline, but they pretend it’s a choir so they can keep the transatlantic picnic polite.
The broader significance? We now live in a world where a freelance columnist can accidentally set monetary policy in four countries before lunch. Call it the Solomon Doctrine: the principle that narrative gravity is stronger than diplomatic protocol. The old order assumed information flowed from the State Department outward; the new one accepts that it can just as easily flow from a Substack in Arlington to a presidential palace in Podgorica, with a layover in Facebook’s algorithmic digestive tract.
And so the planet keeps spinning, tilted slightly by whatever Solomon publishes next. Analysts in Seoul game-out scenarios where a fresh “exclusive” torpedoes the next round of North Korea talks; opposition leaders in Buenos Aires dream that an upcoming article will gift them a U.S. sanctions package wrapped in bipartisan ribbon. Everyone, everywhere, waits for a man most of them have never met to decide which capital city gets to feel special this week.
In the end, Solomon is less a journalist than a weather system: impossible to control, easy to blame, and absolutely essential for anyone planning an outdoor coup. Pack an umbrella—or a conspiracy theory—because the forecast calls for scattered revelations with a 70 % chance of geopolitical fallout. And remember: in our interconnected age, when America sneezes, the world doesn’t just catch cold; it checks WebMD to see if John Solomon already wrote the symptoms.
